20 March 2012 Gamer News

British PhD Candidate, Michael Cook, has created an AI that develops video games from scratch in just ten minutes. The AI, dubbed “Angelina”, an acronym for “A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I’ve named Angelina”, creates and evolves three individual “species” which come together to create the final game. ‘Maps’ define the playable area, ‘layouts’ choose the various entities in the world and ‘rule sets’ decide how objects move and interact. After combining the three species Angelina plays the game four hundred times to find problem areas which are then discarded. However, humans are still needed to create the audio and visuals.

Bethesda settles Scrolls lawsuit

Elder Scrolls publisher, Bethesda, has settled their lawsuit with Minecraft developer, Mojang, allowing them to name their upcoming game ‘Scrolls’. Bethesda had originally claimed the title Scrolls was too similar to the Elder Scrolls trademark. Bethesda will now own the trademark to the word “Scrolls” but will licence it for Mojang to use but they will not be able to use the Scrolls name in any future sequels or other titles.

Valve making a console? Valve says no... At least not yet

Valve’s Marketing Director Doug Lombardi has shut down rumours suggesting the company is developing a home console. The rumours began following recent comments from Valve CEO, Gabe Newell, stating that they would sell hardware if it had to. The rumours grew stronger when pictures of a potential prototype emerged alongside a patent filed by Valve for a controller with swappable components. Lombardi has now stated Valve is a long way from shipping any hardware, while the prototype was simply for testing Valve’s upcoming “Big picture mode” which allows for Steam games to be played easily on a TV.